Don’t. Show a web page and open the print dialog, and tell people to save as PDF. All major browsers support this, and the browser HTML to PDF code is the most robust and accurate.
Ask HN: What is nowadays (opensource) way of converting HTML to PDF?
11–20 of 170 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is nowadays (opensource) way of converting HTML to PDF?
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
doesn't pandoc rely on some engine itself?
Curious why that matters to you? I mean everything has dependencies (some of the solutions elsewhere require Chrome and other common solutions require the JVM). At least Pandoc is GPL.
It matters because pandoc is not rendering the website to pdf, it converts the html to latex and then uses a latex engine to render the pdf.
Re: Ask HN: What is nowadays (opensource) way of converting HTML to PDF?
#13chrome --headless --disable-gpu --print-to-pdf https://example.com
Re: Ask HN: What is nowadays (opensource) way of converting HTML to PDF?
#14Puppeteer and Playwright are the main open-source options nowadays, both solid for HTML → PDF once your print CSS is sorted. Don’t forget proper page breaks (break-before/after/inside) — e.g. break-after: page works in Chromium, while always doesn’t. For trickier pagination you can look at Paged.js, and I’d test layouts in Chrome/Edge before automating. Shameless plug: I run yakpdf.com, a hosted Puppeteer-based servi…
Seconded. I went with C# + Playwright. I tried iTextSharp, iText, PDFSharp, and wkhtmltopdf, but they all had limitations. I had good results with Playwright in minutes, outside of tweaking the CSS like you mention.
I documented the process here[0] if anyone needs examples of the CSS and loading web fonts. Apologies for the article being long-winded – it was the first one I published.
[0] https://johnh.co/blog/creating-pdfs-from-html-using-csharp
Re: Ask HN: What is nowadays (opensource) way of converting HTML to PDF?
#15openhtmltopdf is what we're using. Some outdated versions.
Re: Ask HN: What is nowadays (opensource) way of converting HTML to PDF?
#16https://gotenberg.dev/ ...has been working well for me for the last few years. It's a headless instance of Google Chrome with a golang wrapper. Runs well in Docker or a cloud instance.
gotenberg is really rock solid for us. Easy to deploy as a docker container to any infrastructure.
Re: Ask HN: What is nowadays (opensource) way of converting HTML to PDF?
#17pandoc
Does pandoc do JavaScript? For stuff that is rendered (I don't want animated, interactive PDFs...).
Re: Ask HN: What is nowadays (opensource) way of converting HTML to PDF?
#18chrome --headless --disable-gpu --print-to-pdf https://example.com
same:
google-chrome --headless --disable-gpu --no-pdf-header-footer --hide-scrollbars --print-to-pdf-margins="0,0,0,0" --print-to-pdf --window-size=1280,720 https://example.com
ended up using headless chrome specifically to make sure javascript things rendered properly
Re: Ask HN: What is nowadays (opensource) way of converting HTML to PDF?
#19If you don't really need the PDF but just want to archive pages, SingleFile is better. It'll capture the entire page to a single HTML file and I find this is better than the PDF if I don't want to print it. It's a browser extension, but there's also a command line version (https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/single-file-cli) that uses Chrome or Chromium's headless mode.
Re: Ask HN: What is nowadays (opensource) way of converting HTML to PDF?
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
doesn't pandoc rely on some engine itself?
Curious why that matters to you? I mean everything has dependencies (some of the solutions elsewhere require Chrome and other common solutions require the JVM). At least Pandoc is GPL.
There are multiple ways to "depend", so if pandoc executes some external tool all of the work then might as well use that external tool directly. You will get more control over how the conversion happens, know for what search for when in trouble etc.